Medical spider silk gets an upgrade

Medical technicians already spin spider silk, the strongest known natural fibre, to make mats and sponges as scaffolds on which to grow human cells. These structures would be even more useful if their stiffness could be adjusted. Cells grown on a scaffold as stiff as bone, for example, would more readily fuse with bone cells when reimplanted into the body.

Now a team of biomedical engineers from Tufts University in Boston, Nottingham Trent University in the UK and the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, have figured out how to stiffen spider silk. Their secret is to reinforce it with microscopic glass beads diatoms, a single-celled marine alga, use to reinforce their protein shells.

To fuse the two materials, the engineers combined a silk gene from the golden orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes) with a gene ...

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